


Once Upon A Time

by timeturners



Category: Cinderella (Fairy Tale), League of Legends, Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale), Rapunzel (Fairy Tale), Schneewittchen | Snow White (Fairy Tale)
Genre: F/M, ashe white and the seven cute yordles, cinderella and the robotic foot, little red riding psycopath, rapunzel in her ivory turret
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 22:17:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5223014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timeturners/pseuds/timeturners
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Festival celebrating the unification of Zaun and Piltover is coming soon, but Orianna is not allowed to go because she is a robot. What will she do when presented with an opportunity to promote robot rights in Piltover, through something called the Glorious Evolution? </p><p>Annie lives in the Voodoo Lands with the magical Grey Order, but one day her grandmother goes missing. What will she do when her home is threatened by the Devil's Bear and werewolves alike?</p><p>Lux has lived in a turret ruled by her mistress Morgana her whole life, learning technology and desiring magic. What will she do when a dashing stranger (who's not such a stranger after all) offers to take her on the adventure of a lifetime?</p><p>The Freljord is ruled by Ashe's stepmother Lissandra, who is cold and cruel. What will happen when her father dies and Ashe is blamed for his death?</p><p>Orianna as Cinderella, Annie as Red Riding Hood, Lux as Rapunzel and Ashe as Snow White. Stories based off original fairy tales. All stories interconnected with one another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Orianna is a gifted robotics engineer who happens to be a robot herself. A stranger approaches her about this aspect of her life.

Dancing is hard with one foot. But Orianna manages it anyway, twirling on the tip of her one intact leg, long and straight and metal. Her left one, however, is a stump ending in a tangle of red and blue wires. Her metal arms are positioned as if she’s hugging the Ball, and she spins without abandon, pirouetting into oblivion.

     The bell signalling that a customer arrives scares Orianna into collapsing to the floor. She quickly gets back up, embarrassed. She dusts herself off and stretches her spidery metal fingers, and hides the stump of her foot behind the counter. No reason to let customers see how awkward she’s been looking. It’s been like that ever since her stepsister Ava ripped it from Orianna’s foot when they saw her dancing, because robots like her aren’t supposed to dance. (“Whoops,” Ava giggled. “It was an accident!”)

    Orianna has been trying for ages to attach the broken foot back to her ankle (it lies on her counter right now, waiting for her to fix it), but she needs a special fuser and synchroniser that she really can’t afford right now. The only thing she can make the foot do is create a small explosion by putting the red wires together and almost burn her face off.

     The shop hasn’t even been open for ten minutes – who could be coming _now_? Someone must be really urgent to fix a problem with his or her robot. Or perhaps an android is coming for self check-ups. A lot of robot patrons have been coming in nowadays, since the Festival is arriving soon.

     “Good morning,” Orianna says at the counter as the customer approaches.

     The customer, probably a man, is covered with cloth and cloaks that make it hard for Orianna to see his face. She finds that she’s ill at ease because she can’t see the man’s face, only glowing orange eyes. When he speaks, the voice is metallic and harsh.

     “You’re Orianna Reveck? The robotics engineer? The only adopted robot child in years?” the man asks. She starts to think maybe he’s not a man, or a _human_.

     “Yes,” she says uneasily, though it’s not really true. She wasn’t adopted. She’d been created by Corin Reveck, her ‘father’, and accepted into the family. Nothing’s been the same since Corin died; her stepfamily does not love her. “Do you need help with anything?”

     “In fact, I do,” he says, lowering his voice and prompting Orianna to lean forward to hear him better.

     “My name is Viktor.” The name rings no bells. “Have you heard of the Glorious Evolution?” Orianna shakes her head. “It’s a movement of robots and cyborgs who want to promote android rights, yeah?”

     “Okay…” Orianna says. She feels oddly nervous. This person creeps her out.

     “You’re a robot who lives around humans. You’ve been pushed around your whole life,

Viktor says. Secretly, Orianna agrees. It’s true; her stepfamily have always treated her like a burden, an extra mouth to feed, and that the only freedom she’s allowed is to own her mechanic shop. She’s not allowed to eat at the table with her family. She’s not allowed to smile, laugh, _touch_ humans, she’s not allowed to read the same books, she’s not allowed to sit in the same places as the other kids at school. She’s lucky she even _goes_ to school.

     But she’s gotten used to it.

     “Yeah?” she says. She’s curious what this guy has to say suddenly.

     “We want rights for all mechanical people, cyborgs, androids, sentient machines and golems alike,” Viktor says. Orianna squints. She can hear how passionate Viktor is about it, his metallic voice enthusiastic. She can tell he’s spent a long time preparing this, that he’s gone around to other robots to promote his cause. It seems harmless to Orianna. Why not join?

     “First we’ll talk about the segregation in The United Cities,” Viktor tells her. She leans in, interested. “You know of the separate seatings for robots and humans on public transport, at cinemas and at many other social spaces. We must abolish this system of separation, for humans and robots must _exist_ together to _coexist_ properly.”

     Orianna hummed in agreement. It was true; whenever she took the bus to school in the mornings, she had to sit in the small, dingy one-seater whereas all the other human kids sat together and played, even though the driver was a robot.

     “Secondly, we strive to give robots the same professions as human beings,” Viktor says. “You know that robots are not allowed to have positions in the parliament, or are allowed to work for the government. We believe allowing robots into this sort of profession will improve human systems.”

     Orianna nodded.

     “There are many things we are preparing to do …” Viktor says, and here he hesitates like he’s about to tell Orianna something shell-shocking. “We believe that robots will not only improve the system of professions but also rather … well, change _everything_. Robots are superior.”

     “Huh?” Orianna asks, bewildered.

     “You and I, we’re very similar,” Viktor says, his voice becoming silky and soft, so unnatural with the normal rigidness of it. Orianna suddenly finds the proximity with this man unnerving and feels her skin crawl. “You fix robots, I … _create_ them. I’ve been working on a machine for years that will help me make more, and in quick succession. I’ve been calling it the Converter–”

     Orianna suddenly jerks back, stumbling. Her bad foot imbalances her and she almost topples for the second time. “ _No._ That’s why you’re called the Glorious Evolution–”

     “Humans are such a waste of space, yes?” Viktor says, and Orianna can guess that he’s grinning from his happy tone of voice. “They fight too much, die so quick. What better way to create robots, then turn _humans_ into them.”

     “No!” Orianna yells. “You’re talking a change of species, the loss of humanity. That’s horrible.”

     “We both have humanity,” Viktor says softly. “We’ve both been programmed with personalities and morals.”

     “You certainly haven’t!” she yells as Viktor walks closer to her, holding a silver hand out to her as if trying to comfort her. “If you did have morals you wouldn’t be thinking of forcefully turning humans into robots.”

     “It’s already happened, you see them with cyborgs and things–” Viktor argues, walking closer to her.

     “That’s because they were injured in an accident or whatever,” Orianna says. “Don’t come closer!”

     “Robots are _better_ ,” Viktor says. “They have databases in their minds, extendable limbs, superhuman knowledge, strength, everything a human doesn’t have!”

     “But humans have _empathy_ , they understand one another,” Orianna shouts. Viktor is _really_ getting too close. She skips backwards on one foot, keeping her eyes on the creep every moment, her hands scrambling on the counter for _anything_ , a screwdriver, a wrench.

     “If we work together, we could create a whole _race_ of perfect automatons–”

     “Nobody _deserves_ getting turned into _this_ ,” Orianna says, gesturing to herself, gesturing to her

metal limbs, her awkward legs. “Nobody deserves becoming a monstrosity.”

     “Are you seriously sympathising for the people who have _hurt_ you, _abandoned_ you, treated you like they would treat garbage, and still expected you to be there at their beck and call, because you should be grateful that they made you in the first place?” Viktor asks, genuinely curious and distracts Orianna long enough – she’s actually thinking about what he said, about if she should even be defending humans – for him to slam her against the counter, his metallic hands gripping her shoulders.

     She’s about to scream but he clamps one hand over her mouth. The other hand wraps around her stomach and he lifts her up as she thrashes wildly.

     “I need you to help me perfect my machine, because you are one of the most famous robotics engineers in the United Cities,” Viktor tells her, “whether you like it or not.”

     “ _Let me go_!” Orianna’s thin hands flutter about, still _searching_ –

     Her fingers close on something small and hard, and she uses all her strength to bring her arm back over her shoulder to smack Viktor on the face, the hard object in her grasp.. Her hand pangs – What the hell is he made of? Pure rock? – but so does Viktor’s face it seems, because he lets her go and she tumbles to the floor.

     She looks at the object in her hand – _laughs_ , because it’s her foot of all things – but Viktor begins to restrain her again and she scurries away.

     Orianna is suddenly so glad, so glad that her whole shop is so full of dangerous things. She scurries on all fours away from the actual shop and behind into the large storeroom. As she crawls away, she tosses everything in her path over her head and hears the clunk every time it hits Viktor. Metal scraps, screwdrivers, hammers, wires; all of these are flung as Orianna desperately tries to escape.

     “You cannot escape the Evolution!” Viktor screams.

     Orianna finally pushes herself off the ground, hopping on one foot as she does so, and skids to a halt as she approaches the wall. She has stopped with two long, wobbly, light shelves full of items and spare parts on either side of her. Viktor is at the other end of the long line. Orianna is worries the shelves will fall onto her; they’re unsteady and probably will fall if Orianna pushes too hard on one of them. He probably grins at her, knowing there is no way she can escape now.

     “Come here, little girl,” Viktor says triumphantly.

     “Yeah, right after you shut up,” Orianna says and slams her hand as rough and hard as she can into the left shelf. Suddenly, the light shelves shake and crash down, metal and devices and hell raining down upon her as she does so. Viktor shrieks. Orianna determinedly hopes that he is drowned underneath all that as she skips out of the wreckage and hops back into the shop, perhaps to call for help, to tell someone that there’s a _psycho_ in her shop.

     No such luck. Viktor has superhuman speed and with an iron grasp, clamps onto Orianna’s shoulder. She screams in frustration as Viktor spins her around. If they were human, they’d be haggardly breathing. But they can’t breathe.

     Orianna also cannot move. Viktor must be some kind of robot, because his strength is rough and unrelenting.

     “You are making this _very_ difficult,” Viktor says. Orianna can see ugly orange eyes.

     The only thing Orianna has in her hands is the foot. She almost laughs again. She hadn’t realised that she’d been holding on it for this whole time. There’s still nothing she can do, she can’t reach her arms far enough to slam the foot against Viktor’s face this time. The wires poke out of the foot in a tangle of red.

     The red gives her an idea.

     “You – will – never – get – help – from – me!” she says, grunting and jerking with every word. At the last word she takes the foot, gets the wires and putting them together and tearing her face away from the imminent event–

     An explosion rips through the air, the broken wires creating a violent shattering that ripples and flicks sparks. Orianna falls to the floor as Viktor releases her, shrieking. He must have not looked away.

     Roughly, she rolls up, scrambling through the drawers and getting the first thing she can – a slotted screwdriver – and begins repeatedly smacking and stabbing Viktor, who screams. She stabs without abandon, relishing in the shouts of pain every time screwdriver hits steel flesh.

     Viktor finally gets up and stumbles away, sending a look of pure loathing as he darts out of the shop and into the street.

     “And stay out!” Orianna yells.

     Her database tells her that her adrenaline levels are rising too high, and that her heat capacity is getting so high that cooling receptors are automatically turning on, but Orianna doesn’t care. She stares at the oil-soaked screwdriver in her spidery palm, and imagines there’s blood on its tip. She just _stabbed someone_ , almost _to death_. She’s stunned.

     She was right. Robots have no humanity.

     The bell signalling another customer rings again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Annie's grandmother has gone missing, and Annie is determined to do anything to find her.

Annie’s grandmother has been missing five days, thirteen hours and forty-two minutes. But who’s counting? Annie is certainly.

     She’s been counting ever since that morning when Seraphina, her lovely, strong, brave, brilliant grandmother, disappeared from her bed. She’s been counting ever since that day when the elders of the Grey Order sent search parties, but all of them half-heartedly, because sometimes people go missing and there’s nothing you can do about it. She’s been counting ever since a part of her disappeared.

     Annie misses her grandmother’s hugs, her scent, her beautiful, flowery scarf, but most of all, she just misses her grandmother. She misses her grandmother’s comforting presence, the presence that tells her everything’s going to be all right.

     “Dad, has anyone found her yet?” she asks as soon as she wakes up in the morning. Annie’s father Gregori, along with her mother, is a leader of the Grey Order, the society living in the Voodoo Lands.

     Her family are at the small, low, woven table in their living room, sitting on rocky floor and eating greens and grains. The members of the Grey Order believe arcane magic can only be achieved through taking as little away from nature itself and giving back as much as possible. Annie would really like a wooden chair sometimes.

     “Ah, no, sweetie,” Gregori says hesitantly. The spark of hope in her chest deadens.

     “Why not?” Annie asks, her hands curling into fists.

     “There’s just more … _pressing_ matters at the moment?”

     “Like what?” Annie says furiously. “Why is finding grandma not first priority?”

     Amoline speaks up. Everyone tells Annie she’s the spitting image of her mother but she can’t see the resemblance. They both have red hair and green eyes, sure, but Annie is short and pudgy while her mother is willowy and graceful, rude and impatient while her mother is diplomatic and tolerant. Most of all, Amoline is … inherently good. She knows right from wrong, knows how to punish fairly, knows how to treat kindly. Annie has none of this inborn goodness. She has to think before doing things, but she never does, which often causes trouble for her.

     “The Devil’s Bear – and the Moon Wolves – still lurk near us,” her mother tells her, forehead creased, “and nothing is of greater importance than to destroy the beasts.”

     Annie knows what the Devil’s Bear. It’s the evil bear that lives in the petrified forests near the Voodoo Lands, the one that causes trouble, the one that burns down whole sectors, the one that the Grey Order has worked for months to kill. The Moon Wolves, however, are less open about destroying the Grey Order, but _have_ taken children into the forest before probably. They can’t be sure, because ever since the Grey Order colonised this place, there have only been some sightings and none of them definite. However there are legends of moon-reliant wolves. They, of course, only strike when the moon is fullest.

     But Annie also knows that her grandmother has worked so hard to create the miniature villages surrounding by such an abundant forest, near the cleanest, clearest river in Valoran. Annie knows her grandmother is more important than some glorified teddy bear.

     “So you’re _not_ going to find her then?” Annie says furiously. Her question is directed at Amoline, who never had a good relationship with her husband’s mother.

     “We will do whatever we can, while we can,” Amoline says and Annie is angry at how calm she sounds.

     “Let me get this straight, you’re not going to use all your forces to help grandma while the Devil’s Bear is still on the loose?” Annie inquires, crossing her arms.

     “Correct.”

     Then Annie is going to find this beast and kill it. She’ll do anything to save her grandmother – she’s not dead, she _can’t_ be – who is the only person who understands her better than Annie herself. So, how do you kill a bear?

     She doesn’t have school today, thankfully, so she leaves the house to do whatever she pleases as soon as she finishes her breakfast. Normal children her age play games with one another, playing Catch with balls of arcane energy, or racing around with superhuman speed, or reading books of magical studies. Annie is not a normal child.

     What she does instead is go to the village prison.

     The part of the Voodoo Lands that Annie and her parents – and two hundred other people – is called the Petrified Forests. It’s not actually in the forest, but very near it. Once a barren wasteland, the Voodoo Lands were populated and colonised by the Grey Order decades ago. Now the Petrified Forests have a manmade river, crops and beautiful little houses, and Annie admires all of this as she walks past it all, knows that her grandmother helped create this, knows that _this is why_ her grandmother must come back.

     Perhaps the only place that is ugly in the whole of the Voodoo Lands is the little prison. There’s only one prisoner, an ugly blue man – is he even human? – named Ryze. He has tattooed spells and enchantments all over his body. The funny thing about him, Annie thinks as she enters the prison (which has no guard; nobody can escape the magic of the Grey Order), is the enormous scroll that he carries upon his back. Early when he was apprehended and arrested, they tried to separate him from it, but found they were unable and just chucked him in with it anyway, thinking that it couldn’t help him escape.

     Ryze has escaped four times in the past, and there was a huge uproar every time he did so. Of course, the Grey Order caught him very quickly afterward, and upped the security each time.

     Annie observes this skinny blue man and thinks that he can’t be anything that special.

     “Hello,” she says cautiously. Ryze is sitting calmly in a cage, reading the moving, glowing spells written all over him. Bars separate them, but Annie can’t feel but a little uneasy with the intensity of Ryze’s stare.

     “Little girl,” he says and he looks bored. “What do I owe the pleasure?”

     “I want you … I want you to teach me magic.”

     He suddenly barks with laughter. “What’s this? Daughter of the Grey Order’s leaders, the students of old, ancient magic, seeking advice from a simple magician?”  
     “You’re not a magician,” Annie says firmly. “Otherwise they wouldn’t keep you here.”

     “How clever of you.”

     “You’re being sarcastic,” she says, narrowing her eyes.

     He spreads his hands, shrugging. “What can I say? Captivity makes a man bitter. So, what’s that you said about me teaching you magic? I thought that’s all they taught you there in those little brainwashing facilities.”

     “That’s called a _school_ ,” Annie says, quick to defend her hometown. “I’m not surprised you didn’t go to one. And anyway, I don’t want you to teach me just magic, I already know that, there’s a particular spell I want to learn.”

     “And what’s that?” Ryze drawls, sounding bored.

     “A soul-binding spell.”

     She expects Ryze to guffaw at her, and he does exactly that, roaring with laughter, tears pooling from mirth at the bottom of his intense eyes.

     “It’s not funny,” Annie says seriously, glaring at him.

     “It is!” Ryze laughs. “ _You_ , a little _girl_ , learning how to bind souls.”

     Annie finds that he is very irritating. If only there was any other person in the whole village that could and would teach her.

     “Is it because I’m little,” she says coldly, “or because I’m a _girl_ , that you’re laughing?”

     Ryze thinks on this. “A bit of both, really.”

     “Well, you’re going to help me learn how to do the spell regardless,” Annie says.

     “Or what?”

     Annie smiles. “Or I won’t help you escape.”

     “Ah,” Ryze says. His laughs are gone and it’s replaced by a look of intense thought. “You’re clever.” This time he doesn’t sound sarcastic.

     “I know,” Annie says simply.

    

*

 

“Soul-binding is the act of taking something with a physical body essence and placing it into a _different_ physical body,” explains Ryze. “Do you get it?”

     “Yeah, yeah,” Annie says impatiently. “What I want to learn is how to actually do the spell.”

     “Quiet down, you need to understand what you’re doing completely first,” Ryze says, reading from the enormous scroll in his lap. He’d taken it from his back earlier and he looks stranger and smaller without it shadowing over him. Both of them are sitting down cross-legged and facing each other through the bars of his prison. Annie looks over at the scroll in Ryze’s lap, and sees the runes and languages, all unknown to her.

     “I _do_ understand–” she says, but the look Ryze gives her is reprimanding and she quiets down.

     “The body can be an actual body, and can also be an average object, anything physically existing can be a container,” Ryze explains slowly like Annie won’t get it. “That can be anything from taking the soul of a human and putting it into another human – very bad for the mind and body of both parties, I must say – or taking the soul of human into an inanimate object, which will give the object humanlike qualities. It can be putting the essence of a human into an animal, or an animal’s into a human.

     “I don’t see how this will help you kill the Devil’s Bear,” Ryze admits. “It’s all very advanced stuff, I’m sure your parents can’t do this spell.”

     “But _I_ will.”

     Ryze reads aloud from the scroll more, telling her useful tips and things, until it’s late. Then, he finally says, “Okay, time to go home, kid.”

     “I’m not a kid,” Annie argues.

     “Yeah, you are,” Ryze grins and for the first time Annie feels like grinning back. Ryze isn’t … he isn’t the most charming of folks, isn’t the nicest, isn’t the prettiest, but he’s smart and funny and Annie thinks that he’s similar to her grandma. “’Kay, come back anytime you can, you need to come back soon or you’ll forget everything I just told you.”

     “I won’t!” Annie says, giggling. “Okay, promise you won’t escape until you help me?”

     Ryze smiles offhandedly. “Sure. I promise.”

     “You need to pinkie promise or it’s not a real promise,” Annie adds seriously.

     Ryze laughs and they join pinkies together through the foreboding bars of his prison. “I promise.”

     “Good, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Annie says and then skips out into the cold night.

     How elated she feels! She’s finally going to be learning how to cast that spell, which will rid the threat of the Devil’s Bear from the town, and will also allow opportunity to find her grandmother. These happy thoughts keep her from getting scared by the dark around her.

     Then, a growl rips through the night.

     Heart hammering, Annie whips around. _It can’t be, it’s not even full moon, they can only come out when it’s full moon_ –

     But the wolf is living proof that they come out when it’s not full moon. The wolf is on all fours, eyes glowing red in the night. Annie lets out a yelp as the wolf bounds towards her, slobbering and teeth glinting. The wolf is wearing something around its neck but Annie can’t see, and in any case, doesn’t want to. All she wants is to run away.

     She runs backwards as the wolf leaps for her. It catches her and slams her down as she shrieks and attempts to roll away.

     “Morsel, tasty morsel, food, _food_ ,” the wolf growls in a deep undertone. This surprises her less than the fact that the wolf stands on two legs, almost in a humanlike position. It is _enormous_ , a wolf of immense size and strength.

     She reaches out with her only hand and slaps the wolf’s thick fur. It only laughs; her hand is like a feather against steel.

     But the slap isn’t to do damage, or to shock the wolf, or to even distract it. It’s to heat up her hand. She’s learned it all in fire-making class; heat up the hands by rubbing it together or hitting it against something hard.

     She slaps again and again and the wolf only guffaws and spits in her face. But her hand is hot enough now, pained from repeated pressure, and she imagines _fire_ , inferno, blaze, cities burning down, forests exploding with flame, and most of all, the hulking, huge Devil’s Bear rising from the firestorm burning the Voodoo Lands to the ground.

     A spark of flame ignites in the palm of her hand, close enough to the wolf’s fur that it sets fire to it.

     The wolf begins screaming. Annie, encouraged, rubs her hands together again and causes even more fire. She blasts it from her hands and a small wave of heat rushes and attacks the wolf. It shrieks and howls in the night, dancing and running away back into the forest, a flaming animal writhing until it dies.

     Annie is not even guilty. She’s proud. Her grandmother would be proud too.

     But she can’t dwell on these thoughts, and she goes to alert her mother and father of what just happened. Because for the first time since the Grey Order first settled into the Voodoo Lands, a Moon Wolf has been spotted.

   

 


End file.
